The first inspection of the maternity unit at the hospital finds concerns about how patients were assessed and treated.
Healthcare Improvement Scotland has published its first safe delivery of care inspection of maternity units. The inspection, at Ninewells Hospital in NHS Tayside, found good teamwork and compassionate care but concerns specifically about how patients were assessed and treated.
As a result of concerns identified during the inspection at the end of January, the national healthcare improvement organisation made another unannounced revisit in mid-February which focused on variation in practice to assessing women within maternity triage and to staff access and awareness of retrieval of emergency medication within the maternity triage department.
“During the revisit, we were not assured that sufficient progress or improvement had been made with some of our concerns and we therefore formally wrote to NHS Tayside outlining areas of assurance required. NHS Tayside responded with details of immediate improvement actions taken,” said Donna Maclean, chief inspector of Healthcare Improvement Scotland.
An improvement action plan has now been developed by NHS Tayside to meet the requirements for both maternity and acute services.
Working together
Along with 20 requirements, recommendations made are that NHS Tayside improve their assurance of staff bereavement training; that it put in place processes to support mothers and babies to have access to family-centred care with extended family members actively encouraged to engage in maternal and newborn care; and that it should consider ways to improve oversight and staff feedback of interpretation services, to ensure any areas for improvement can be identified and addressed.
The review of Ninewells Hospital comes to a backdrop of an increase in the death of babies in Scotland in September 2021 and March 2022 that Public Health Scotland (PHS) said breached “statistical control limits”.
A report, published in February last year recommended that NHS boards should work together to identify any improvements that can be made to the existing systems and that local perinatal mortality reviews and Significant Adverse Event Reviews (SAER) are carried out consistently and in a timely manner. It also recommended that boards improve the recording of ethnicity data in maternity services, given the significant gaps in this data and the importance of understanding and addressing potential health inequalities.
NHS Tayside says that it has taken on board all of the recommendations and has developed plans to address them.
